Study: Facebook Crowd Is Unwittingly Inviting Crooks

(May 5) -- More than half of Americans who use social networks are posting online information that makes them vulnerable to crime, in both the cyberworld and the real one.

That's the ominous word from Consumer Reports' National Research Center in releasing its January study of 2,000 U.S. households this week. It found that social networking is skyrocketing in popularity, with two out of three households using sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and Twitter, nearly double the number from a year ago.

The report also found that millions of users are naive about the risks they create when they post personal information such as their addresses and birth dates.

"Many people use social networking sites to share personal information and photos with their friends quickly and easily," said Jeff Fox, Consumer Reports' technology editor. "However, there are serious risks involved, which can be lessened by using privacy controls offered by the sites."

Fifty-two percent of social networkers post information that puts them at risk for cybercrime, according to the report. In addition, 9 percent of social networkers actually experienced some form of abuse within the past year.

Abuse includes scams, identity theft, personal harassment and "malware" infections. Malware is short for malicious software, which is designed to harm, cause data loss or take control of the user's computer.

Consumer Reports estimated that Americans have lost $4.5 billion over the past two years to cybercrime and have had to replace 2.1 million computers compromised by malware.

Users who post information such as a full birth date -- month, date and year -- (38 percent); photos of children (21 percent); children's names (13 percent); home street address (8 percent); and details when away from home (3 percent) are especially vulnerable to becoming victims of cybercrime, the report said.

PleaseRobMe.com, a website created to drive home the dangers of sharing information online, gave this example: If your name and address are readily available online and you tweet that you're somewhere besides your home, anyone who has access to that tweet could use that to plan a robbery.

"On one end we're leaving lights on when we're going on a holiday, and on the other we're telling everybody on the Internet we're not home," PleaseRobMe.com said.

In another example, computer security experts say personal photos are risky if they contain information such as school names or children's names. Even details in the background -- a car license plate, signs, the name of a sports team -- can reveal your location or affiliations.

Consumer Reports also noted that while Facebook limits membership to those age 13 and over, younger children manage to sign up. It recommends that parents become an online friend to monitor their kids' activities.

"What they think is nothing can actually be pretty serious," Charles Pavelites, a supervisory special agent at the Internet Crime Complaint Center, told Consumer Reports. "For example, a child who posts the comment, 'Mom will be home soon, I need to do the dishes' every day at the same time is revealing too much about the parent's regular comings and goings."

Among social networkers, Consumer Reports also found:

• Twenty-six percent of Facebook users with children had potentially exposed them to predators by posting the children's photos with their names.
• In one in four households with a Facebook account, users weren't aware of or didn't choose to use the service's privacy controls.
• Forty percent of online households surveyed reported that they had at least one virus infection in the past two years.

In the Consumer Reports' study, Nicole Ozer, the technology and civil liberties policy director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, cautioned, "We're just at the beginning of seeing what the implications are for so much information being posted on social networks."